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NaNoWriMo? Maybe?

So there’s this thing. Maybe you’ve heard of it. NaNoWriMo. Yeah, it’s an unwieldy name. However, the concept is great. National Novel Writing Month leads so many people to write massive amounts of words. Lots of words. Oodles of words. You know, enough to fill a novel.

Well, I have this friend. She’s a teacher. And she’s teaching her fifth and sixth grade class NaNoWriMo. Yeah. Her students are each going to write a novel. That’s pretty cool!

And then she asked if I’d do it with them, so they saw an adult who WASN’T their teacher tackling the challenge.

Oh.

Um.

Eloquent me.

On one hand, it would be a blast to write. It would also force me to write a good deal more than I have lately. And at the end of the month, even if I miss the goal of having a novel done, I have quite a bit toward a novel!

On the other hand… oh, boy. Well, I have a novel I’m working on right now. In fact, I’m waiting for my beta readers to get back to me so I can do one final edit before submitting it. And once I have those edits back, shouldn’t that novel take precedence?

And there’s my calling as a pastor. I can hardly commit to writing nightly now, and November brings with it preparation for Thanksgiving as well as gearing up for Christmas. Adding a novel on top of that? (Plus I have a few writing assignments associated with that call – weekly devotion packets, along with some worship materials that will go out to a larger church body.) Plus the crisis du jure that ALWAYS gets in the way of writing.

Third, I’ve written two novels, but both just sort of happened. I hadn’t been planning on writing a novel; as I wrote, it simply took on that form. Can I sit down and purposely do this? That’s intimidating for me!

Those are three big reasons to not participate with that class. And yet, I can feel the siren call of a challenge just outside my grasp. I suppose I could do something like Snow and Smoke, where I just post some part of a story every day and see where it leads. I did Snow and Smoke for nine weeks straight; can’t I just do that again? 500 words a day should be manageable, even if it doesn’t reach the overall goal of a novel-length manuscript.

Published by Jon

I'm a pastor in Wisconsin. Constantly writing, whether it be fiction or sermons or anything in between. Husband and father. Over all this, Christian, willing and joyful servant to good master Jesus.
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